Posted on 03/09/2026 7:30:58 PM PDT by nickcarraway
“Country Joe” McDonald, who fronted the band Country Joe and the Fish and became an emblem of the 1960s antiwar counterculture through a prominent appearance at the Woodstock festival, died Saturday at age 84.
The singer, born Joseph Allen McDonald, died of Parkinson’s in Berkeley, according to a statement on the group’s social media and reported sources close to his wife.
McDonald’s best known song was “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” a Vietnam protest song he performed at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The performance included the infamous call-and-response “Fish Cheer,” which had the audience spelling out the F-word at McDonald’s behest.
Born on January 1, 1942, in Washington, D.C., McDonald grew up in El Monte, California, where he played trombone with dance bands on the weekends. He joined the Navy as a teenager — serving from 1959 to 1962 — before returning to L.A. to attend state college. He moved to the Bay area in 1965, where he co-founded Country Joe and the Fish with guitarist Barry Melton in Berkeley.
The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard “It was suggested that the group be called Country Mao and the Fish because Mao Tse-tung said that the revolutionaries move like fish through the sea, and I said that was stupid,” he told the website Classic Bands. “It was suggested that we call it Country Joe and the Fish after Joseph Stalin.” Although, of course, he was the true “Joe” of the group’s moniker, the connection was not a big stretch: his communist parents had named him after Stalin.
The band released its debut album, “Electric Music for the Mind and Body,” in 1967. It did not include “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” or “The Fish Cheer,” apparently due to fears of censorship, although it did include protest songs like “Superbird,” which satirized President Lyndon Johnson. The more controversial material made it onto their second album.
Of his famous protest song, McDonald told the Street Spirit website, “The important thing about the ‘Fixin’ to Die Rag’ was that it had a new point of view that did not blame soldiers for war. It just blamed the politicians and it blamed the manufacturers of weapons. It didn’t blame the soldiers. Someone who was in the military could sing the song, and the attitude is, ‘Whoopee, we’re all going to die.’ Most peace songs of the era blamed the soldiers for the war.”
Some of the Woodstock audience was already primed to join in on chanting “The Fish Cheer,” which had picked up notoriety after McDonald was charged with inciting lewd behavior for its appearance in a Massachusetts performance.
McDonald explained the group’s origins: “I moved to Berkeley in the summer of 1965, after the Free Speech Movement. So I came up here from southern California and got miraculously tapped into the folk music thing that was happening here at that time. I met Barry Melton at the University of California folk festival, and we hit it off. I started playing a few of my songs, and he played lead guitar. We were a duo. Then I met some other people, and Ed Denson, Mike Beardslee and I started putting out a little magazine called Rag Baby… a biweekly that had music articles and schedules of things that were happening around town, music and dancing and events. It was mostly focused on folk music and the folk scene.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Of “Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” he said, “The only reason I could write those lyrics was having grown up in a socialist family. My parents were members of the Communist Party when I was born, but later became disenchanted with them. And then they became part of the Progressive Party and the left socialist parties that were around. I read the leftist newspapers and I was familiar with the basic tenets of socialism about the industrial complex that generates war. So I was able to write lyrics about the warmakers that profit from war, and I was able to write a lyric from the point of view of the soldier because I had been in the military.”
Additionally, he said, “I felt disenchanted from my parents, in a way. As far as politics, we didn’t have a very good relationship, so it was easy for me to say: ‘Come on mothers throughout the land, pack your boys off to Vietnam.’ And that sarcasm was a really nice thing, and GIs love sarcasm.”
McDonald continued to write songs addressing environmental issues and civil rights, releasing dozens of solo records after Country Joe and the Fish disbanded in 1971.
Fifty years after writing his signature song in 1965, he sang it at an anti-nuclear protest at Livermore Laboratory on the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
In a 2016 interview, he said, “I find the concept of 50 years incomprehensible. But it’s indisputable because I have children and some of those children have children and I know that the math is right. And I just finished an album and the title of it is ’50’ because it’s 50 years since the first album. It’s called ‘Goodbye Blues.’ I didn’t die, so there you are. I’m still alive and I’m still doing something. Filling a need helps a lot, and it keeps me sane.”
He continued, “I grew up in a family of radical socialists, and quite honestly, I really get bored with the theory and speechifying of various movements and philosophies from the left. It doesn’t mean I don’t support them. But as an entertainer, I know that you can lose your audience. I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and I consider myself a morale-booster for these causes. I don’t do it if I don’t support the cause and the ideas and the people that are doing it. It’s really quite remarkable what people are doing in many movements. I like to support these movements, because they are sometimes not mainstream and no one else is supporting them, and so I feel an obligation to do it. As an activist, I like to give a voice and to support people and movements that don’t have mainstream support and visibility. And I realize that my name has a certain notoriety and that my presence can be a morale-booster.”
Although complete information on his family was not immediately available, McDonald said in interviews that he had five children, and is known to be survived by his wife, Kathy.
My era
My embrace as a kid
RIP
Bell-bottom Hell.
Heh heh...they were better than the double knit craziness that followed.
Thats so bad. I can’t believe anyone liked that. It’s like me making up goofy crap at home. Just awful. I’m not even talking about the lyrics, which are stupid too. Worthless garbage. People are so weird.
Give me an F!!!
After Vietnam, we had an invasion of hippies at App State in the mid 70’s. All were former military. Many were Vietnam vets. They were drawn to the weed culture of Boone, cheap land and the girls. Oddly, most of the ones I knew were Marines.
Glad to hear that you got good advice there on your heart from a reliable source.
I am certain that had I been of age, I would have enlisted on my own, and could have met that fate. Pretty sure I would have joined the Navy back then, though. Not the Army or Marines.
Absolutely.
I never, ever would have considered ever saying that word, or any cuss word in front of my father. He was very controlled in that kind of thing. He would say words like Hell and Ass, but I nothing else, not even Shit. And he especially never said the "F" word.
It is a family joke, that when he was angry, the most common insult that he used was to call you a "Dumb bunny". We giggle about it today, and wonder "What the hell is a "dumb bunny", and how did THAT ever enter my dad's lexicon?
But when he was angry and advancing slowly on you, the tone of his voice was extremely threatening, and when coupled with the look on his face, when he said jump, we jumped.
I didn't hear my dad utter the "F" word until just a few years before he died. Boy, I sure do miss him.
I won’t disparage him as I know little about him and don’t care to know any more than I do know.
I do give the man credit for what I do know.
He captured the moment at Woodstock.
It was a stupid war UNCONSTITUTIONALLY declared although the SCOTUS slow walked making that official until it became a mute issue.
The lesson was you NEVER risk blood and treasure when political objectives supplant military objectives.
Not sure the lesson has ever been learned by the puppet masters who pull the strings.
I don’t doubt that. Guys who were drafted into the Marines against their will must have felt they were in some kind of special Hell. I don’t doubt that there were a higher percentage of them who went the other way once they got out.
Free from that strict yoke.
I should clarify though-I very much disliked hippies, what they stood for, and everything else back then. I was a very strait laced kid even until I was nearly out of the military myself, though I drank like a fish.
But now...I only feel that extreme dislike and even repulsion towards Leftist, militant hippies. Especially the young ones, who deliberately want to look like those people from the Seventies, even wearing the same clothes and such.
Other hippies? The ones who seem apolitical and flaky? I get along okay with those. They aren’t hippie “wannabes”...they seem mentally like real hippies, and in today’s world, I can kind of understand it and am more tolerant of them.
My sister and her now-passed husband were a case in point. I see those types as generally harmless.
FWIW, there's a cubic ton of Dixieland and similar horn-band jazz tunes with that same rhythm and feel that have overlapping melodies and chord structures. Proper attribution and credit was rare.
That's not to excuse outright plagiarism, but I'd be willing to bet that Country Joe didn't realize he was channeling a 40-year-old tune he may have heard at some point in his past.
OTOH, if he knew he was ripping off an older tune, well that's the commie way, right?
Leisure Suit Larry.
Bell-bottom Hell.
Heh heh...they were better than the double knit craziness that followed.
I got it all together now
With my very own disco clothes, hey
My shirt’s half open, just to show you my chain
And the spoon for up my nose
I am really somethin’
That’s what you’d probably say
So smoke your little smoke, drink your little drink
While I dance the night away
-Frank Zappa (Dancin’ Fool)
As far as I'm concerned, our education system should make sure every U.S. student has to hear and learn about Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Sevens. How can you be a U.S. citizen without at least that?
That video just brings out emotions took me back to 1970 when I was ten years old and saw a protest snaking its way to Times Square.
Not everything they did was political, or anti-war.
“Bass Strings”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9uCG6wV0Ag
“Who am I”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ1OWvpfW44
Rest in peace, Joe.
It took me 55 years to get that damn song out of my head, and watching it again put it right back in there.
I despise that song and what it was conveying, but damn...it is a catchy tune and I found myself humming it inside my head.
Dammit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.